My new PIII 733 Dell Optiplex GX 110 didn't come with a CD drive. The boot only gives the floppy or C HD on the boot list even though I've installed a LieOn CD/DVD drive/. In the list of possible extra HDs, there are no CD drives to choose from. Naturally the CD/DVD drive I installed has it's drivers on the install CD....

How do I find and load a Linux driver that will allow the computer to see the CD drive so I can do the EMC BDI 4.38 Debian CD?

Thanks!

If you have access to another computer, consider transferring the drivers and files to a USB thumb drive then just create a directory on your Dell PC and copy the files into your new directory. Also, I'm sure that your Dell has some generic CD drivers on it somewheres that would get you up and running, just install the new CD drive and let plug and play offer to search your operating system and/or go online for a suitable driver.

Fredstev

Did you check in BIOS setup to see if the computer even sees the drive? Perhaps you have not set a jumper correctly, depending on which ribbon cable you have hooked the new drive to.

Typically, I would put the HD on IDE Channel 1 and the CD on IDE Channel 2. That way, each one can be jumpered as master.

Hu's right - its not a driver issue if the Bios isn't seeing the CD rom, just a HD.. Adding In addition to Hu's suggestions check the Bios has all ide interfaces enabled, Check the bios isn't explicitly defining the devices on each ide port, ie set them all to auto.. Once the Bios recognises the drive(s) most Linux distro's should pick it up and enable drivers automatically.

On edit: this is what I get for not reading carefully. The dell bios is user friendly, so that means fixing things is impossible if the bios can't get it right by itself. If you installed the cd on the same cable as the hard disk and didn't set the jumpers, they are probably wrong. Dell usually uses cable select. If the cd has a cable select setting use that. Otherwise, I usually use the secondary ide port and a second cable. If the hard disk is cable select, you'll have to use cable select on the cdrom. If that doesn't work, for seperate cables put both the hard disk and the cd on master. Finally, liteon drives can boot very slowly. Try putting the cd (jumpered to slave) on the same cable as the hard drive (jumpered to master).

Bottom line is, until the bios recognizes it, no operating system is going to recognize it.

The rest of the post stands on it's own.

The joys of linux are boundless. Sometimes there is a /cdrom and you can mount the drive there. Or it may automount on many modern distributions. Put a disk with data in the cd and type ls /cdrom
If that don't work, type ls /mnt/cdrom

Once you mount the disk, it's just like a subdirectory of your hard disk.

If it wasn't mounted, here's how to get it mounted manually.

Before you panic, go to the /mnt directory. Check to see if there is a /mnt/cdrom directory, usually there will be one. If there isn't, make one:

mkdir cdrom



then put your cdrom in the drive, and type the following:

mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdc -r cdrom

That's if it's the secondary master drive, if primary slave, it's probably /dev/hdb
You can check by typing

dmesg|more

and look for something like:

hdc: ATAPI 14X CD-ROM drive

So in this case, the drive is /dev/hdc.

try it, it can't hurt anything.